These are the three steps men should take to avoid a sexual harassment lawsuit, according to a now-infamous 2005 Saturday Night Live sketch. More than eight years after it first aired, the YouTube video of the skit still gets cited in online discussions of sexual harassment as "evidence" that our culture is deeply hostile to socially awkward and homely men.

In the sketch, NFL quarterback Tom Brady and SNL regular Fred Armisen play office workers trying to pick up female coworkers played by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Armisen's character is shy and nerdy. Even his most tentative moves result in a charge of creepiness - and the prompt filing of a sexual harassment complaint. Brady, famously easy on the eyes, is physically aggressive, even pinching Poehler's breasts as she offers an appreciative, welcoming smile. The take-away of the spoof is obvious: What gets a man rejected by women (or slapped with a sexual harassment suit) has nothing to do with how he behaves and everything to do with what he looks like.

What SNL played for laughs, many men (and some women) took - and still take - seriously: Some men can't win with women, these people believe, no matter what they do or say. This attitude is best observed in the recent backlash against calling men "creepy." "Creep is the worst thing you can call a man," wrote Jeremy Gordon for the Hairpin, pointing out it's an impossible charge for a guy to disprove. As Gordon writes, "creepy is a vibe you can't define... you just know it."

Others argue that "creepiness" connotes something specific: male homeliness. Men's rights activist Robert Lindsay titled a post "Creepy" is Woman Speak for "An Unattractive Man Who Shows Interest In Me," while Thought Catalog's Johanna de Silentio wrote that "there are also a lot of guys who are labeled 'creepy' just because they happen to be really unattractive." I often hear something similar in my gender studies classes. (It was in a "Men and Masculinity" course years ago where an anguished young man first drew my attention to the Brady skit.) Whenever the subject of sexual harassment or "creep-shaming" comes up in class, someone--almost always a man--makes the case that SNL was right: the only way for straight men to safely express sexual interest in women is to do so while following the skit's three rules. With almost invariable bitterness, these young men complain that unless a guy has won striking good looks in the genetic lottery, he's doomed to be rejected and seen as overstepping his boundaries, no matter what he does.

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It's been nearly 50 years since Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 introduced the first federal laws prohibiting sexual harassment. (Just this week, the Supreme Court handed down two decisions that impose troubling new limits on when sexual harassment claims can be filed.) At the heart of the original legislation was the idea that sexual harassment was conduct that was "unwelcome" to those who were its targets. Desire mattered, Congress in essence declared. What is welcomed and enjoyed is, by definition, not harassment. (This can get complicated: there is a separate concept of third-party harassment, which declares, for example, that someone upset by witnessing sexualized banter between a boss and an employee might have grounds for a complaint, even if the employee with whom that boss was bantering welcomed his or her flirtatiousness.)

The fact that the law centers on women's subjective experience is what makes so many of my students and countless men's rights activists so indignant. (While sexual harassment law was and is intended to be applied regardless of sex, the popular perception is that these laws exist primarily to protect female employees from predatory male colleagues and supervisors.) Last year, a young man in my women's studies course criticized an article I'd written for Jezebel defending the use of the word "creep," and did so by boldly misappropriating Martin Luther King, Jr.'s most famous speech. A society where people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, he declared, should also be a society where men are judged "creepy" solely on the basis of their words and actions rather than their looks. He got cheers from several other guys in the classroom.

My student's mistake is an obvious one: Enjoyment can't be coerced. Congress can't pass a law requiring people to be delighted by the advances of others they find unattractive. I can get my children to eat broccoli by alternating promises of rewards and punishments, but I cannot do anything to make my daughter love vegetables as much as she loves ice cream. Similarly, no law can compel "Ashley," a barista at the local coffee shop, to feel the same way about the advances of an older co-worker whom she finds repellant as she does about those of the young hottie who joins her on the opening shift.

Until recently, however, few women could make sexual choices based primarily on physical desire and emotional attraction. In a world where few women had the opportunity to prosper without a man's protection, marriage was about survival. The more educational and economic opportunities women acquire, the more opportunity they have to choose based on what they want rather than what they need for survival. As Daniel Bergner's bestselling What Do Women Want? argues, once you level the economic playing field, women are just as likely as men to make sexual decisions based on desire alone.

The same principle works for sexual harassment: the Civil Rights Act of 1965 didn't conjure the concept out of thin air. Women had always been sexually harassed in public spaces. What the government did was give the problem a name -- and a remedy. It also formally recognized a woman's right to decide for herself what conduct was welcome and what wasn't.

Men's rage about sexual harassment regulations and "creep-shaming" may well be rooted in an unwillingness to accept these cultural changes that have given women unprecedented power to say "no" to the lecherous and the predatory. Complaints that unattractive, socially awkward men are unfairly labeled "creepy" miss the point. "Creepy" describes having "the creeps;" it's a word that centers on women's own feelings. It's no more "unfair" for Ashley the hypothetical barista to be "creeped out" by the advances of an older, unappealing co-worker than it is for her to be excited by the same approach from the man to whom she's attracted. In that sense, the SNL sketch got to an important truth: Women's subjective experiences and instincts matter.

The freedom to act on those instincts doesn't just lead to romantic fulfillment. In his indispensable 1997 bestseller The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker encourages women to rely on their own intuition to keep themselves safe from violence. There are few things more risky, de Becker argues, than overriding one's own sense of real danger ("the creeps") for the sake of preserving a relationship - or simply being "nice" to a stranger. Crucially, de Becker points out that people-pleasing and the urge to avoid causing offense put more women in danger than acting on sexual attraction. Women are more likely to be assaulted because they were too polite to someone whom they sensed was creepy than because they were too responsive to the charms of someone who turned them on.

When men complain about being "creep-shamed," or insist that the Tom Brady sketch accurately reflects reality, what they're really lamenting is a culture that is increasingly willing to honor women's right to be sexual -- and women's right to be safe.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

The new version of Apple’s signature media software is a mess. What are people with large MP3 libraries to do?

When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist, song name, and album title.

Kemp’s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never replaced. Which makes sense: Like the web itself, his schema was shipped, good enough,and an improvement on the vacuum which preceded it. Those three big tags, as they’re called, work well with pop and rock written between 1960 and 1995. This didn’t prevent rampant mislabeling in the early days of the web, though, as anyone who remembers Napster can tell you. His system stumbles even more, though, when it needs to capture hip hop’s tradition of guest MCs or jazz’s vibrant culture of studio musicianship.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A leading neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity shares her research on where genius comes from, whether it is dependent on high IQ—and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness.

As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies creativity, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many gifted and high-profile subjects over the years, but Kurt Vonnegut—dear, funny, eccentric, lovable, tormented Kurt Vonnegut—will always be one of my favorites. Kurt was a faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1960s, and participated in the first big study I did as a member of the university’s psychiatry department. I was examining the anecdotal link between creativity and mental illness, and Kurt was an excellent case study.

He was intermittently depressed, but that was only the beginning. His mother had suffered from depression and committed suicide on Mother’s Day, when Kurt was 21 and home on military leave during World War II. His son, Mark, was originally diagnosed with schizophrenia but may actually have bipolar disorder. (Mark, who is a practicing physician, recounts his experiences in two books, The Eden Express and Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, in which he reveals that many family members struggled with psychiatric problems. “My mother, my cousins, and my sisters weren’t doing so great,” he writes. “We had eating disorders, co-dependency, outstanding warrants, drug and alcohol problems, dating and employment problems, and other ‘issues.’ ”)

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.